As I
planned a second trip to London for college students, I wanted to
be sure a day-trip to Stratford-upon-Avon was included. My
colleague, a Renaissance and Restoration literature professor,
wasn’t so sure. “Stratford’s too
touristy,” was his public stance, but his
not-so-hard-to-discern secret reason was that, somewhere in his
post-Jacobean gut, he carefully nursed an unnatural hatred of
Shakespeare. I won the argument, explaining that the
non-English majors on the trip wouldn’t care whether any
literary critics thought Beaumont or Fletcher were just as good,
but they will have heard of Shakespeare, and if we could get them
excited about the history of English theater via the
tourist-friendly site of the Bard’s nativity, they may find
their ways to the obscurities he so cherishes. My secret
reason for wanting a return, though, was that I was completely
unimpressed with my visit on the previous year’s trip.
I recall walking out of the birthplace on a cool, slightly
overcast morning, thinking that I wasn’t sufficiently
inspired or moved. There I had been, I thought, standing in
the room where the greatest writer in English history had been
born, and here I am now, trying to decide between the two arrows
on the sign: “Garden Path” or “Gift Shop
and Exit.” As I took a photograph of four of the
students on the trip (make that four photographs, as each one of
them wanted the same photograph on their digital camera), I felt
let down, and promised myself I wouldn’t be let down when I
visited the birthplace again.

While
we waited at Gatwick airport with our travel-agent provided guide
for the coach to arrive on trip number two, we chatted about what
we had seen last year, what we kept in the itinerary. I
mentioned “The birthplace,” and the guide, a charming
sixty-something British man, said, “Ah, the birthplace,
everyone says it that way, like it’s Bethlehem. No
need for other identifications or qualifications.” He
was right, at least for me, for that moment in the trip. I
was drawn to the Shakespeare house because there I’d touch
a piece of history, walk through a historic place, talk with
ghosts of the past, or whatever it was we tourists like to do
when we visit sites that take us to far away lands and times.

But
let me be specific: I wanted to be moved in the birth
room. I didn’t care about where the family’s
best bed was kept to show off their wealth or where John
Shakespeare made gloves. I didn’t care about the
period wallpaper, the ship’s timbers, or the mud and animal
hair stuck in the plaster. I wanted William Shakespeare—not
the one image in the National Portrait Gallery thought to be
painted from life or the bust above his grave in Holy Trinity
Church done recently enough after his death it’s presumed
accurate, but a child, a newborn, coming into life screaming and
covered with the otherworldly mess from his mother’s womb.
Weak, helpless, unformed, unable to speak, illiterate, the
Shakespeare I wanted to touch was not the woodcut image on the
frontispiece of a “Complete Works” I bought from a
bookstore’s remainder rack as a precocious literature
loving high school student. That Shakespeare looked almost
not human, the head too round, the cheeks too full, the
perspective far too two-dimensional to be real. In the
birth room, I was going to meet the memory of a child, of someone
who hadn’t written Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, name
your favorite play, the memory of someone human.

Of
course, Stratford was day two on the itinerary. During the
first day, we visited Oxford. In the middle of the day, we
ate lunch at a pub called The Crown Inn, off Cornmarket Street,
which, a tourist website, The Scholar’s Guide to Oxford
tells that Shakespeare visited and “was on very good
terms with the landlord. But he was on even better terms
with the landlord’s wife, Jane Davenant (whom some believe
is the ‘Dark Lady’ of The Sonnets) and is widely
believed to have fathered her son...William.” Was it
hard to get away from Shakespeare, or was I just anxiously
looking for him? Oxford has its own literary histories.
In the great dining hall at Christ Church, we spied the hidden
door that inspired Lewis Carroll to create the White Rabbit’s
secret entrances and exits. Way up the street were facing
pubs—one, the Lamb and Flag, which I had visited before,
played host to Thomas Hardy as he wrote Jude the Obscure;
the other, the Eagle, was a gathering for C.S. Lewis and his
crowd. That Oxford dining hall (more well-known at this
point as the inspiration for a set in the Harry Potter movies)
was lined with portraits of famous graduates of Christ Church.
They looked generally the same to me—old school, drab,
representational portraits—except for one just to the right
of the exit. Much smaller than the rest and with a sad
touch of color and thick, worried-looking,
tired-of-the-twentieth-century lines through the face, hung W.H.
Auden. Shakespeare wouldn’t be the only icon—or
should I just say it: hero—I’d encounter
on this trip.

The
birthplace (I keep wondering if it should be The Birthplace, or
The Birthplace, or maybe even in some Middle English font not
available to modern computer users?) began our agenda for the
second day. Our over-anxious tour guide roused us too
early, and we ended up outside the Shakespeare Center exhibition
next to the birthplace with a half-hour until opening time.
It was nice that we could get photographs of the street side of
the house without the usual crowds of tourists around. The
downside: we had to dodge the frequent van making a
delivery to one of the shops or cafes on this typically
pedestrian-only street. The wait was probably good, because
it allowed the students time to do whatever it is college
students do when they’re bored (i.e., listen to their iPods
or flip their far-out-of-signal-range cell phones open and
closed, hoping for a miracle text-message about what their
friends were up to) and gave me some quiet time to think, to
prepare myself for the moment of inspiration I had been building
up to.

In
these reflective moments, I considered how Stratford was
touristy—the street we were on was filled with small cafes
and restaurants, most of which appeared interchangeable—don’t
like our food, no worries, you can get the same food next door in
a place with a color scheme and tablecloths that are more to your
liking. (Don’t like tablecloths at all? Try
three doors down.) I also thought about Anne Hathaway’s
cottage on the outskirts of Stratford: we had visited it
last year, and one of my concessions to my Bard-hating colleague
was to eliminate it from this year’s schedule. I
thought back to the year before, recalling how this thatch-roofed
home set among its own perfectly maintained English gardens had
the non-commodified charm (despite its gift shop and machines
which, for a pound, would press the lines of a sonnet into a
flattened one pence coin), not to mention a sprawling green area
with sculptures inspired by Shakespeare plays. These ranged
from a massive bronze wall with the British Isles cut out of its
shape to represent the history plays. The cut out islands
were placed in a gravel bed behind the wall—one couldn’t
help but wonder if this suggested that the United Kingdom, in
Shakespeare’s historical conception, had been divinely
ripped from some place and put right where they were meant to be;
or if some other force—the human wills of kings, queens,
nobles, and peasants—led to this drop from the sky, a fall
from grace similar to Adam and Eve’s, with its own
calamitous and somehow solidly reassuring results for Western
civilization. What could be a better way to explain the
divine right of kings than time studying that sculpture?
Should such weighty issues not interest visitors, though,
elsewhere was a sculpture of Bottom, as a donkey, bestially
giving his best to a bent over Titania. Hee-haw.

Days
later, I’d be seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Globe (hee-haw) in the pouring rain. As the then
de-assed Bottom (it strikes me that anyone unfamiliar with the
play may have a very odd Titus Andronicus sort of image in
their minds at that phrase) played the death of Pyramus, the
shirtless actor dove across the wet stage on his bare chest and
stomach like it was a child’s slip-and-slide. About a
week later, I was among the groundlings at a matinee performance
of an exquisite King Lear (probably made more exquisite by
my proximity to the wonderfully mad, noble, pathetic, insightful,
and hurting king played by David Calder, not to mention the
bloody bedlamite beggars circulating through the standing
crowd). Ironic that, as the 16th century machines for
making the sounds of winds and the cymbal-crash thunder sounded,
the London sky was clear blue, the sun brilliant over the
theater’s wooden O, and a light breeze tugging at the
standards and flags above the thatched roof. As a student
on the trip put it, “We had Lear weather for
Midsummer, and Midsummer weather for Lear.”
That’s London, I thought, always handing you something
other than what you want or expect. Of course, like Oliver
Twist, we travelers eat it up and ask for more. It rained
when our group took a cruise on the Thames in 2007. The
same thing happened in 2008. But we’ll do another
cruise on our next trip to London, and probably never consider
planning some kind of educational trip to the Caribbean or a
cruise around the Mediterranean instead of down the Thames, in
rainy weather, toward the Tower’s Traitor’s Gate.
“Please sir....”

But
back to the big “May I have another” moment on this
trip: my return to Shakespeare’s birthplace. I
was determined it wouldn’t be a letdown this time around.
As we finally made our way to the first entrance to the
exhibition on the Bard’s life and times, I tried hanging
back rather than rushing ahead to get to the room I so
desperately wanted to be moved by. Maybe I can let the
students get ahead so I could be more alone, solitary,
contemplative in the birth bedroom. Just me, my thoughts,
the inspiration of the ages, and a guide/interpreter in period
costume. But that didn’t work. Some of our
students weren’t all that interested in Shakespeare, so I
tried to be a good teacher and engage them with the exhibit.
“See these small wooden paddles? They were ‘books’
in the school young William attended, with the alphabet or math
problems on them. And, even in elementary school, he would
have learned Latin.” When one young woman looked at
me like I had just told her Shakespeare was educated by aliens, I
added, “These ‘books’” (here I made air
quotes with my fingers) “were also disciplinary.”
And I brought the flat side of the panel down on the crown of her
head.

Thus
having brought a desire for learning into my charges, I led them
to the displayed copy of the first folio. “If not for
this book, who knows what we’d know of Shakespeare’s
works, whether everyone would love Hamlet?”
One young woman’s look said, “Hamlet’s
boring, so I added, “or Romeo and Juliet?”
A visible expression of “awwww, true love” lit her
face. Well, Shakespeare scholars could give an answer, but
the question seemed to set a suitably reverential tone among our
small group. From there, we happy few set off for the
house, pausing only momentarily so one souvenir hunting young
woman could pay a pound to press the writer’s profile into
a flattened penny, which was worth two American pennies that
day.

I
tried my “hang back” strategy again, but as one of
only two people on the trip who had been to this place before,
everyone waited for me to lead. (In the previous day, the
students had learned that my colleague got lost on any venture
that, geometrically speaking, involved more than one point:
“Continue down Cornmarket Street until you get to Carfax
Tower” in Oxford led him far past the tall tower, then left
to Christ Church meadow.) Of course, exiting the exhibition
into the garden puts you in clear sight of the entrance to the
house; still, the students dutifully followed me. Whether
that was out of deference or uncertainty, I couldn’t say.
I also couldn’t speak of my desire to see the birth bedroom
as a point of inspiration out of fear of my colleague’s
(and, then, with that sanction, the various smart-alecky
students’) ridicule. All of them seemed infected with
the post-modern irony and cynicism that deems ideas of
inspiration, of interest, of fascination, of—dare I
say—true love for anything as corny, false, distrusted, and
useless. (I think of one student’s comment on a
teaching evaluation from a poetry course: it described my
interest in the subject as “passionate and peculiar, but
sometimes corny.”)

I felt
this way in part because, as we sat in the Cleveland airport
waiting for our flight to Gatwick, my colleague pulled out his
guidebook and proclaimed to the group that he made a poor choice
because he hadn’t checked out the contents before
purchasing it. “Look,” he said, “there’s
a section on a ‘blue plaque hunt.’ Who the hell
wants to hunt blue fucking plaques?” Since I think
some of the students still thought I was “cool”—I
was wearing a pretty trendy pair of shoes that day—I didn’t
make a passionate speech about the list of blue plaque houses I
had tucked in my carryon, about the desire to see the houses the
writers I admire had lived in. It even made sense to me to
walk in the footsteps of the fictional characters I loved, too.
How many people (myself included on two separate trips) spend
time in Dublin searching out the gold plaques embedded in
sidewalks bearing lines from Ulysses, or climb the stairs
in Joyce’s Martello to emerge at its sea-windblown
turret-top thinking of “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”
doing the same? After Stratford, we’d be taking a bus
through the Cotswolds, stopping for shopping and a walk through
Bourton, the town, I kept telling everyone, where young Clarissa
Dalloway spent time in the confused relationships of the youthful
well-to-do with Peter, Sally, and Richard. As the only one
on the trip who had read Mrs. Dalloway, that pleasure
would be mine alone—wondering off the tourist path, I
imagined each of the large, creek-front, walled in mansions could
have been where Clarissa kissed Sally. Each tree-lined
walk, each garden could have been where Clarissa chose Richard
over Peter or where she finally told Peter of her decision.
I wasn’t in 2008 necessarily, but I was in the stream of
literature and history, part of something larger than myself and
the place and the book—part, in short, of the whole world.
How do you say that while you’re sitting in the Cleveland
airport discussing the pros and cons of Fodor’s, Frommer’s,
and Lonely Planet and not sound corny, especially when your
colleague wins the students over with his judicious use of the
f-word?

In
London, we’d be staying not far from Regent’s Park,
where Peter Walsh and Septimus Warren Smith cross paths, and also
not far from the Bloomsbury area, a rich game trail for anyone on
a blue plaque hunt. My search plan included a visit to, of
course, some Virginia Woolf homes, and a few poets’
houses: W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath. I
found the Woolf homes easily enough—on our first evening in
London I led our group through Gordon Square on a walk toward the
West End in search of dinner. There’s a plaque at 50
Gordon Square commemorating the various Bloomsbury group members
who lived in the area. Woolf herself lived at 46; a plaque
there marks the home of John Maynard Keynes. The number of
homes with more than one famous resident does make it easy for an
itinerant plaque hunter—or for someone who just wonders
past and happens to notice as much—really feel the eddies
and streams of history. Another Woolf house—on
Fitzroy Square—also bears a marker as a residence of G.B.
Shaw.

The
search for plaques, though, isn’t only about seeing the
homes. It’s also about the walking. Clarissa
Dalloway knew as much about the vibrancy of walking in London, as
she wonders, “did it matter that she must inevitably cease
completely”? The answer is no, since, “somehow
in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
there, she survived.” But it’s not just her
that survives: surviving, too, there’s “part of
people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had
seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her
life, herself.” Virginia Woolf survives; so, too,
does Clarissa Dalloway, despite the fact that she never lived.

It’s
easy to think of the misty connections between people in London,
both because of the ever-present mists and rains and because so
many homes and streets have more than one historical importance.
I had a pint of cask ale in a small pub called The Queen’s
Larder. It got that name because King George III, when
mad, often stayed in an apartment nearby. To make him
comfortable, his wife stored his favorite foods and drinks in the
building that housed this pub. Because the pub was near the
offices of Faber and Faber, when he is in London on business,
supposedly, Seamus Heaney stops in The Queen’s Larder
for a drink. Just across the street stands St. George the
Martyr Church, where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married.
As I sipped an oaky-flavored bitter, I imagined Heaney nearby, or
Queen Charlotte stocking her larder, worrying about her husband’s
health (as well as giving birth to fifteen children and
establishing Kew Gardens), or Hughes and Plath just married,
walking out of the church happy, unaware of what the future holds
for the two of them. Hughes wrote about that day in the
remarkable book Birthday Letters, where the poem “A
Pink Wool Knitted Dress” described what seems like a rather
unremarkable wedding at his parish church (which he didn’t
know he had) because Westminster Abbey was out of the question.
St. George’s sexton was their best man, despite the
children he had just loaded into the bus for a trip to the zoo:
“All the prison animals had to be patient,” Hughes
writes, “While we married.” To Plath, he
writes, “You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean
depth / Brimming with God.” I imagined that moment,
that pink wool dress, Plath’s eyes, which Hughes describes
as “great cut jewels / Jostling their tear-flames”
and think of this couple in that moment, not much different from
any other anxiously marrying couple. I hold that image in
my mind in stark contrast with the various images of these two as
literary Titans, an icon for feminism and a future laureate,
locked amid the battles of literary critics. As I downed
the last bitter swallow of my pint, I expected a couple to emerge
from the church, rich with unyielding possibilities.

I’d
make my way to see Sylvia Plath’s home on Chalcot Square
near Primrose Hill a few mornings later. It was raining as
I made my way there, but by the time I got to her house, the rain
had turned into that mist Clarissa Dalloway thinks of. It
was chilly, and damped one to the bones, but wasn’t heavy
enough to justify the carrying of an umbrella. On the way
there I passed Dylan Thomas’s old home on Delancey Street,
where I noticed a large jar of Nutella on the table in the front
window. That and the pink sweater over the back of a chair
brought the present into focus, and helped explain London.
There are, as Mrs. Dalloway says, parts of people we’d
never meet everywhere. I imagined someone coming home the
night before, taking off her sweater while she waited for a piece
of toast, spreading the hazelnut sauce over it, then packing off
to bed. Perhaps at the same window decades ago Dylan Thomas
was struck with a line or image and began at a different table to
write a poem; perhaps he sipped a glass of whiskey. I
wondered if that woman’s Nutella was less important than
Thomas’s whiskey; was her taking off her sweater less of an
important act than Thomas’s jotting down a sonorous phrase?

A
short walk away was 23 Fitzroy Road, bearing a blue plaque in
honor of “poet, dramatist and playwright” W.B.
Yeats. Before I got there, I saw the streetlight posts
studded with yellow signs bearing the silhouettes of what looked
like meerkats perched above their underground homes, emblazoned
with the legend, “Neighborhood Watch.”
Trepidation filled my walk toward 23: someone—maybe
the man who appeared to be resting in that lorry parked on the
corner?—would call the police, tell them, “I’ve
spotted another American literature-nut taking a picture of
Yeats’s flat.” I’d be stopped with an
official “What’s all this, then?” and hauled
away to a penal colony, forced to copy out Dickens or Milton by
hand. But in the misty rain, no one seemed to notice me.
As I approached the light green house and read the plaque, I
thought of another person who did the same thing: Sylvia
Plath, looking for a flat for herself and her two children, saw
this one for let and took the fact that Yeats had lived there as
a good omen. As on Delancey Street, I could see into the
downstairs window, and noticed the Delft-style pottery. Was
that the flat occupied by the kindly older neighbor from whom she
bought stamps? Through the upstairs window—was that
Plath’s?—I could see the glowing ball of a
chandelier, a fan-like pattern stretched out around where it
entered the ceiling. I thought of her putting the
manuscript of Ariel together beneath that light. I
thought, too, of the scene from the movie made about her life:
she is taken out of the door I was standing feet from, her entire
body covered with a red blanket, loaded into an ambulance which
drives off through London’s snowy streets, her now
motherless children left in the care of a nurse.

Thinking
of the past, it’s hard to separate the lives and births
from the inevitable deaths. Time brings everything to an
end: describing the practice of giving one last cup of ale
to someone walking to his execution, London’s biographer
Peter Ackroyd tells us that the city “consoles those whom
it is about to consume.” That relationship seems to
exist with travelers and tourists, too. In Stratford, we’ll
all part of the bardolatry enterprise, but we’re moved and
comforted by the memorial and grave of Shakespeare in Holy
Trinity Church, especially since it is so near to the baptismal
font probably used for his very baptism. And there we have
it, his baptism and death: two dates we know from his life
with historical certainty, both commemorated in the same
building. An ale cup and the scaffold in London past; a
baptismal font and a grave forever in Stratford.

It’s
always intrigued me that we don’t have a written record of
Shakespeare’s birth, though I suppose there are scores of
famous people that’s true for. (Think, too, how many
unknown men and women have left no record of their lives at
all.) But we have the Shakespeare birthplace, the house
that drew pilgrims like Charles Dickens, John Keats, Mark Twain,
and Thomas Hardy. (P.T. Barnum, supposedly, once wanted to
buy the home and ship it piece by piece to the U.S.—think
of the money I’d have saved on travel, not to mention not
getting shafted on the weakness of the dollar, had he followed
through with that plan.) And there I was, walking into the
room where Shakespeare was born, students and disinterested
colleague in tow. Immediately, the costumed guide lit up
and began talking about the lives of women during Elizabethan
days. She also talked about the chamberpot, how it would be
emptied out the window into the street. (Interestingly, she
didn’t mention that it was filth that led to the discovery
that this house was owned by William’s father, John
Shakespeare: according to a BBC website, there was an
instance of John “leaving a muck pile outside his Henley
street home and records show he was fined for this offence,
proving he did indeed own a house there!”
Shakespeare’s birthplace, uncovered because of a pile of
shit—this is what I wanted, I think, the body of the Bard
himself, in all its stinking, human glory.)

That’s
when it hit me—not the awe-inspiring moment I had
expected, but a feeling of satisfaction with the visit. I
started asking questions about the birth itself, about what the
medical procedure of giving birth would have been like. I
imagined not the infant William Shakespeare, but the ordinary,
discarded pieces of tissue, the expelled fluids, the human
“waste.” The placenta may have been buried in
the backyard as a superstition. No doctors would have been
present—no men at all would have been around—but the
mother-to-be would have had her close, married, women friends
there. These “gossips” as they were called,
would have had some idea of what to do, probably from their own
experience; one them, I thought, must have cut the umbilical
cord. It’s possible, but unlikely, that forceps would
have been used in the birth. I was satisfied as I walked
down the back stairs—stairs added when later generations
turned the house into an inn—that I had touched greatness,
if only because I had seen through the greatness of the Bard to
his humanity, especially at a moment of weakness, at his earliest
moments of life.

I
thought back to Shakespeare after leaving the house where Yeats
and Plath had both lived. Not far from there on Chalcot
Square was a blue plaque for Plath herself. Plath’s
daughter tells us that this house was “where my mother and
father had their first London home, where they had lived for
twenty-one months, where my mother wrote The Bell Jar,
published The Colossus, and gave birth to me. This
was a place where she had truly lived and where she’d been
happy and productive—with my father.” Of
course, the biographers can also tell us that, when Hughes
returned late from an appointment at the BBC, Plath destroyed the
papers on his desk and his treasured copy of Shakespeare out of
suspicion and jealousy. When the young, small family moved
out of London to Court Green in Fall 1961, this home was turned
over to David and Assia Wevill.

I
entered the square down the street from it, but because I was too
afraid of looking like a tourist, stopping to figure out the
numbering system before rushing to the plaque-emblazoned home
(probably a bit wary a meerkat or two would pop out of the ground
and point at me—You don’t belong here!), I
ended up walking the entire perimeter of the square before
finding that house. It was painted violet, a soothing
color, especially that day as the rain was softening to a mist.
The small yard in front was full of some bushy plant with tiny
violet flowers budding on the ends of tiny stems. Their
color was calming, and the plants looked as fragile as spider
webs, like they might break if the rain came back harder. I
didn’t stay long, but thought quickly of Plath and Hughes
taking their daughter to the square’s green. Because
of road construction or repairs of some sort, it was impossible
to get to the green. (I had been able to walk into Gordon
Square, a few days earlier, where the Bloomsbury group are
commemorated with a small sign including a picture of Woolf and
Strachey on a bench; I sat where I imagined that picture was
taken, imagining Virginia Woolf sitting there nearly a century
ago, saddened by the deaths in her family but full of the
possibility of her remarkable writing career.) It seemed
right that I couldn’t go to Plath’s green, as if that
was a personal space cordoned off, just as so much of her life
(of anyone’s life really) remains separate from everyone
who later seeks to know them. I thought of Auden’s
(whose portrait I’d seen in the dining hall he ate at as a
young man) elegy for Yeats (whose home I had just come from):
“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the
living.” The life, too, it seemed, changed as we
reimagine it for ourselves.

I
decided to walk the long way back to my hotel near Euston
Station, since the rain had softened to a mist. It was so
soft that an umbrella seemed unnecessary: it blocked so
little moisture, and the mist was so fine that it seemed to hang
in the air long enough to fill the space under the umbrella’s
moving shelter. With my map I knew to make my way up
Primrose Hill, then down toward the zoo and through Regent’s
Park. The zoo, where Plath and Hughes had taken their
children, and Primrose Hill, where Plath also would have taken
them. At the top of the hill, the view was stunning, even
in the mist. I could see St. Paul’s easily; Wren’s
dome was instantly recognizable. I was able to guess which
tower was Parliament, which craggy building was Westminster
Abbey. A silver sign bore an engraving of the view and
legends for the buildings, but the beaded up layer of water made
it hard to read without wiping it clean.

Two
men were there with surveying equipment, and one of them said,
“It’s hard to make out that sign on a day like
today.” Recognizing my American accent in my answer,
he began asking where I was from, what I was doing in London, and
so on. He told me that they were up there checking the
sight lines for new buildings. “Nothing new can go up
if it blocks the views from Primrose Hill—the one good
thing London Planning does.” Even amid the mess of
newer buildings, the kind of postmodern architecture that Prince
Charles complains about, London’s monuments dominated the
skyline. Though cranes are visible everywhere, St. Paul’s
dome still looms over it all. As I walked down the hill
toward London on what happened to be my last day there, I
realized London’s other monuments—its great
literature and its history of varied individuals—stood
clearly, too. Shakespeare, Plath, Yeats, Thomas, Shaw,
Woolf, everyone who played out some part of their life in this
city left a piece of who they were here somehow, yet each of them
left something larger than the small houses they were born in,
lived in, or died in. Like Christopher Wren who, the
inscription on the floor of St. Paul’s tells us, needed no
monument but the cathedral, these writers need only as monuments
King Lear, Ariel, or Mrs. Dalloway.
London Planning doesn’t need to worry about sight lines to
preserve their homes; their work does that well enough. But
some small preservation of the past, of their homes, connects us
to the London of the past, and despite all that city’s
rich, royal, and imperial history, seeing their homes and walking
in their footsteps connects us to their everyday lives.
Understanding that, finding that transforms the tourist checking
off a list of places to visit and monuments to see into a
traveler, a human traveler who is one with the world’s
distant parts and past times in small and large ways.

Gary Leising is
the author of a chapbook of poems, Fastened
to a Dying Animal, published by Pudding
House Press. His work has appeared in many literary
journals, including Indiana Review,
River & Sound Review, River Styx, and
Barn Owl Review.
He lives in Utica, New York, with his wife and two sons, where
he teaches creative writing and poetry as an associate
professor of English.